For GOP, Impeachment Is Ultimate Political Test / Drive to oust Clinton may haunt party in 2000

Whatever it is, there will be a stunning display of it in Washington today as House Republicans fly in the face of public opinion in their move to impeach President Clinton.

A handful of GOP defections could still save Clinton this ignominy, not to mention a Senate trial. But whatever the outcome, the historic vote will put the majority of Republicans squarely on the wrong side of most raw political calculations.

Republicans have not necessarily transmogrified en masse into statesmen and stateswomen, a vanishing breed in modern poll-driven poli-

tics. National surveys showing public opinion running 60 to 40 percent against impeachment mask much stronger support for removing Clinton from office in solidly Republican districts. And some figure that the public's attention span is so short that by the time the next election rolls around, all will be forgotten.

"Self-abnegation is not what votes in Congress amount to," said a leading House Republican. "These people are voting their districts, I assure you."

Still, there is evidence that Republicans may be doing something else, too. GOP leaders with an eye to holding their party's House and Senate majorities and regaining the White House in 2000 wonder whether the drive to unseat a popular president amounts to mass political suicide.

GOP governors like California's Pete Wilson and New York's George Pataki have publicly decried what they call an ill-conceived impeachment campaign that will lead to Republicans being punished at the polls, just as they were after the 1995 government shutdowns.

Nor do Republicans welcome an Al Gore presidency. If the Senate actually convicted Clinton or he resigned, many believe that the combination of a voter backlash and Gore's incumbency would ensure a Democratic victory in 2000.

More telling, no moderate Republican from a tightly split district has much to gain politically from joining a conservative jihad against Clinton, who carried many of their districts in 1996.

As with most matters in real life, such unnatural boldness -- or mind- boggling blindness -- among so many politicians is neither pure high nor low principle, but a gray and fluid combination that more than anything reflects an all-but-unbridgeable philosophical divide between the parties.

That members are wrangling with their consciences and their role in history seems indisputable. San Diego Republican Brian Bilbray -- who was elected by the narrowest of margins -- shut himself off from the press and constituents, retreating to his beach home to surf, contemplate and read the Federalist Papers, before announcing his vote for impeachment.

South Bay Republican Tom Campbell, hardly a partisan foot-soldier, confounded public opinion in both his district and his state, where he hopes eventually to run for Senate. "I have my obligation," Campbell said. "I'll do my duty by my oath to the Constitution, my oath to God under the Constitution. . . . I believe that I must judge this on the basis of the law and the facts."

While voters typically ascribe cynical motives to politicians, often with ample justification, members do take unpopular stands on certain grand occasions based on principle.

"It isn't always a question of being at the front of the parade," said the leading House Republican, who views his own colleagues with some cynicism. "It is more often than people imagine a question of doing the right thing."

He recalled constituent calls running 10 to 1 against going to war with Iraq in 1990, but he voted to do so anyway. "On the merits it was not a difficult choice," he said. "For me (impeachment) amounts to the same thing. The precedent that would be established -- that felony perjury is not an impeachable offense -- is one that the country cannot live with."

Clever political analysis has certainly been turned on its head. The move to impeach was widely dismissed after Republicans lost five House seats in the November midterm elections. "God knows it wasn't inevitable," said Bill Kristol, publisher of the conservative Weekly Standard. "None of us thought it would happen." Neither did the White House.

Political scientist Alfred Balitzer of Claremont McKenna College said political analysts "have all sorts of smart and cute reasons for things. But sometimes, as the Bible says, something happens to harden Pharaoh's heart. Sometimes people dig in their heels for all sorts of motives which don't correspond to the smart way of analyzing politics."

"When people dig in their heels that way," added Balitzer, a former Reagan administration official, "it's because they really think that something is so wrong that they can't cross a line. That seems to be the case increasingly with the Republican Party in Congress. They think Bill Clinton's behavior is so abominably wrong that they cannot cross the line of compromise."

The White House and most Democrats, by contrast, believe Republicans are motivated by a visceral, quivering partisan hatred for Clinton. Flummoxed by the president time and again, their policy initiatives co-opted or defeated or twisted to White House advantage, Democrats say, Republicans are simply out for blind revenge.

White House press secretary Joe Lockhart lashed out at Republicans this week, accusing them of pursuing impeachment against the will of the people "because they're mad at him or they don't like him or they don't like the way he comports himself or they don't like the way he speaks. . . . They view this vote as some sort of mechanism to punish the president because they don't like him and they don't like the way he does business."

Added Representative Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, "To some of us, it appears not to be justice but some form of revenge. . . . The Republicans weren't successful in politically defeating him so they had to take him down another way."

Some Republicans view Clinton as a cat whose ninth life is about to expire. "It's like slaughtering a pig," said a top Senate GOP aide. "(Republicans) have been running around chasing the greased pig, they finally caught it, hung it by the ends of its feet, they're drawing the knife back to strike. Is it an ugly process with the pig squealing? Yes. Are you going to flinch at the last moment? Probably not. Is that courage or obstinate partisan stubbornness, or ignorance, or high mindedness or low mindedness? It could be all of the above, some of the above or none of the above."

The impeachment vote, because it is so momentous, may reveal more than any other how deep the ideological divide between the parties has grown. Almost all Democrats believe that Clinton's offenses are not impeachable, while almost all Republicans disagree.

"It's just fundamental," said Pelosi. "People don't understand how different the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are in the Congress of the United States."